The COVID Class War Heats Up – Tablet Magazine
Justification of censorship in terms of a state of emergency. Today s 21st-century technocratic progressives use the same excuse of a national or global emergency to shut down debate and dissent on the issues of climate change, race relations, gender identity, and COVID-19 policy: There s no time to act, false information is dangerous, it s an emergency, people are dying from [insert threat here climate change, systemic racism, debating gender definitions, or questioning the efficacy of lockdowns]. It is no surprise that the woke apparatchiks at YouTube are pulling videos by doctors who question the scientific consensus the questioning of received consensus through experimental investigation and interpretation of data being the foundations of the scientific method while Amazon censors books on the pandemic, gender dysphoria in children and teenagers, progressive virtue culture, and other subjects that deviate from the ever-shifting Democratic Party line.
Today s progressives often argue for canceling and deplatforming experts and pundits on the grounds that opinions deviating from progressive orthodoxy literally threaten the safety of individuals exposed to those opinions. Someone who disagrees with you, even someone who does not robotically recite the woke left formula of the day, is literally assaulting you and deserves to be fired and banned from the public square and erased from historical memory. Many on the right mistakenly attribute this mentality to cultural Marxism, which hoped to substitute college students and racial minorities for the working class as the agents of socialist revolution. But this is not 1960s-vintage cultural Marxism; it is 1900s-vintage Social Gospel Protestant progressivism, in a new, secular form.
Absent another lethal pandemic, at some point in the next year or two, thanks to a combination of vaccination programs and herd immunity, lockdowns will be ended by state and local governments that have not already done so. But sooner or later there will be another crisis, and the dominant culture of technocratic progressivism and its adherents will insist it can only be addressed by expert-led, top-down, centralized government allocation of resources or jobs. Once again, whatever the new problem happens to be, we will be told that it is an emergency, that democratically elected officials must defer to the policy views of unelected academics or career civil servants, and that disagreement and debate threaten the survival of America and the personal safety of us all.
Just wait and see.
Michael Lind.